Loneliness

I look back on my high school years as being much, much easier than my college years. The paradox for me is that high school was significantly more strenuous than college. During high school I would wake up at 5:45am every weekday and wouldn’t come home from school until roughly 12 hours later. I had way more schoolwork, most of which I didn’t care about at all. And I struggled with massive identity issues feeling trapped at home and being unable to live the kind of intense, competitive lifestyle I always craved. In college, by contrast, I got to live life my way, I had way less stress from school, and I was exposed to a plethora of transformative life experiences through internships, travel, and research.

But college felt much harder to me, and I now realize that was all due to my social life. In high school I had a consistent group of friends that I would hang out with every single day. We were all in the same classes and obviously saw each other before and after school, so it was impossible to go a single day without friendship. College, on the other hand, was much more isolating. I had to make friends on my own, which took me about a year to get used to. I also had to place intentional effort on maintaining friendships, because I couldn’t count on just seeing them everyday in class by default. That is something I have just recently learned to prioritize. In my four years of college, I reached the best physical shape of my life, I set myself on a path for my dream career, and I developed a genuine sense of self that I felt confident in. But every single aspect of my life was much more difficult than it should’ve been because I was missing the core ingredient of human fulfillment: social connection. Without this, I effectively lived life on “hard mode” for all four years.